Workstation RAID Card Shoot-Out

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RAID isn’t just for servers anymore. Luckily, as our storage demands continue to grow, the cost per gigabyte of magnetic storage is heading southward. Workstations, media center PCs, gaming rigs—wherever you’re hoarding your digital video, music, photos, and crucial data—they can all benefit from higher capacity, increased redundancy and failover, faster performance, and greater flexibility. One of the ways you can make better use of the drives stacking up in your PC is with a RAID controller. If you’re looking for faster throughput, longer uptime, or improved data security, there’s an array that’ll help you get there. A good number of new motherboards ship with some kind of RAID support, but is their performance up to snuff? How do add-on RAID cards compare?

Today, we’ll be looking at three 4-port SATA RAID controller cards from Adaptec, LSI Logic, and Promise. We’ll be comparing their performance against the RAID support provided by the ICH7R southbridge on the P5WDG2-WS, an Intel 975X-based motherboard from ASUS. Continued…